The Hope (15 page)

The Rain Man was waiting for me at the end of the walkway, not looking at me but standing there with his back towards me in this hunched position that said, “Come on, come and get me.” I went up close but not enough to touch him because I wasn’t stupid. The water was up to my shins.

“Face me,” I shouted over the rattle of the rain. “Let me see your face.”

He didn’t say a thing, but he began to turn round nice and slowly to stop himself from falling over. When I saw his face, a giant key clicked into place inside my head.

The Rain Man was the man who’d given me the fish all those months before. I didn’t know what to say or do. I didn’t have the right to scream vengeance at him, because I hadn’t exactly treated him like royalty when he came to the kitchens for scraps, and I certainly wasn’t about to beat him up. So I stood there with the rain falling into my eyes and mouth.

The Rain Man smiled. His eyes were bloodshot as if he had been crying for years on end and the bags beneath them were flowing out tears. His skin was kind of runnelled with lines eroded into it, down his cheeks, nose, the backs of his hands, so he seemed old and ill. And in his smiling mouth I saw nothing but water streaming from roof to tongue, one continuous stream like a curtain.

He held out his hands to me, water filling the cups of his palms.

Then he dissolved, just like that, a rush of water falling splash, sending a wave to break against my shins, ice cold and lonely. Even his clothes. Nothing left, except the water in the bottom of the ship and he was part of that now, to be sucked out by the bilges and pumped into the sea and then to be breathed up by the sun and become cloud and wait for the next storm, the next rainfall, when he could come down and take shape and live for a while and belong, until another rainstorm washed him away.

I envy him that. Belonging.

Sorry to have taken up so much of your time, but I like to tell people about the Rain Man. It’s like I have to tell someone, and every time I do I feel a little better. But I’ll never be completely well.

See you again sometime, maybe?

Goodbye.

CARNAL APPETITE

Eddy and Diane were something of an item. In fact, in the eyes of their peer group they were as good as married. They had been going out for seven months, three weeks and two days.

Ask Diane and she will tell you it was love at first sight. She went down to the Neptune’s Trident one night to escape from her parents and there was this barman, gorgeous-looking guy. That instant she knew they were destined for each other. She sat at the bar all night and he chatted with her between customers. By the end of the evening, she was his, body and soul.

Ask Eddy and he will tell you about a horny-looking girl who came down one night and just hung around and hung around, kept ordering drinks and talking to him. He was just being polite, but it was clear she was meat for cutting, you know what I mean? After closing time, he took her back to his cabin. You can guess the rest. Tell you one thing. Damn cherry, man!

Diane moved in with Eddy a week later, leaving behind her mattress in the corner of her parents’ cabin and her screaming baby sister and a view of the ocean (at least, if you stood on tiptoe outside the cabin, you could see a vertical grey line that was probably the ocean). They had been together since.

She did not have a job, but Eddy made enough to get them by. Days, she would wander the decks, cadging stuff if she could, being really nice to the stoppers, going anywhere except up to her parents’.

Nights, she would sit in the cabin doing nothing, waiting for Eddy to come home. You might wonder what she thought about as she sat there in the semi-darkness, squatting on the bed, brooding and alone. Perhaps she was simply praying Eddy would come back alive. He got into scraps now and then, went to the pool with Riot, and he also hit customers who asked for credit or jerked his chain in any way. Perhaps she was scared he might end up in someone else’s bed, that slag Gilette’s most likely. Now, Eddy was pretty faithful – as faithful as you could expect – but he did not like Diane to sit in the Trident all evening. Cramped his style, he said. He meant as a barman, naturally. She went in for a drink now and again, just before closing time, and that was OK, but mostly she sat in that cabin and waited. You might think she even went a little crazy doing that.

One evening Eddy came in a bit late, but when Diane asked him where he had been, he said he had stayed behind for a drink with Riot and a few of the boys, planning.

“Not another fight,” she complained.

“You just keep it to yourself. I’m not meant to tell you anything, and anyway it may never happen, but Riot says Lock and his boys, they’ve been pissing us off good and proper. Happens again, we stomp on them.” He pulled off his T-shirt, which had sweat stains down the front and under the armpits, went to the basin and began sluicing water over his back and face.

“I’m scared about you, that’s all. I don’t want to be left alone. Eddy, I can’t think of life without you, don’t you see that?”

“And I can’t think of life without you, baby,” Eddy said, through a burble of water.

Diane undressed. She had been wearing knickers and one of his shirts, the one with “ALL A MAN NEEDS IS SIX INCHES OF STEEL AND SIX INCHES OF PORK” written on it in fabric paint. She slipped under the blanket, still slightly coy about her body even after all this time, all this intimacy, this knowing each other inside out.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I shouldn’t have complained, but I’m glad you told me. We shouldn’t have secrets, don’t you think?”

“No,” he replied, rubbing his face with a towel, “no secrets.”

He stripped down, removing his flick-knife from his back pocket and placing it by the bed within easy reach, and got in beside her. She snuggled close and, after kissing him, traced with her finger the line of a knife scar he received in a scrap three years ago. It ran from his nipple to the middle of his stomach.

“Tell me again how you got this, Eddy.”

“Scrap. Defending a girlfriend. Four guys wanted her, and I wasn’t going to let them touch her. Took them, all four.”

“Was she pretty?”

“Not as pretty as you, darling.”

She touched the scar again.

“Did it hurt?”

“A bit.”

“Does it hurt now?”

“No.”

She gazed in adoration at his body.

“Spot, Eddy. Whitehead.”

“Where?”

“Neck. You wash properly?”

“’Course.”

“Want me to pop it?”

“OK.”

“I love you, Eddy.”

“I love you too, Diane.”

Eddy left early the next morning, some “stuff” needing attention. The scraps frightened Diane. It wasn’t good. Fighting didn’t get anyone anywhere, especially if Eddy got stabbed or killed even though everyone said he was the best fighter. He had been kind of preoccupied last night, like he was thinking of something else. The sex wasn’t bad or anything, it was always good, but she liked to talk during and after and he had not been in the mood. Told her to shut up and go to sleep. Poor Eddy, he must have had a tiring day. But she loved him all the more for his weaknesses: the preoccupation, the fighting, the bad moods. In spite of them, because of them, he needed her, he really did.

Diane turned over in bed and stuck her hand beneath the mattress, groping around until she found a tin box that had once contained her father’s tobacco. The smell of the box reminded her of the cramped confinement of her parents’ cabin. Through the haze of cloying smoke, while she was sitting in the corner trying to think of nothing, would come her mother’s voice: “Why don’t you go out and do something, Dido darling?”

It meant that her parents wanted to do sex but that awful nickname, as affectionate as a gunshot, was enough on its own to get Diane out. She had tried to get interested in reading books, something to while away the time, but the creepy man in the library put her off right away. It was as if his thick glasses could see through her clothes and he was examining her tits, wondering what she was like in bed, dying to get his sweaty little fingers on her. So there was nothing for it but to wander the deck aimlessly for hours until the boredom got too intense and staring at things trying to appear fascinated got too difficult. It was different when you had someone as fantastic as Eddy to come back home to. When you only had tobacco smoke and parents and, later, Annie, a screaming baby sister with smelly nappies, every minute spent wandering was both relief and torture, and when you got back in, waiting for you there was only a curt “And where have you been?”

The night she met Eddy at the Trident was the first time she had gone downstairs on her own after dark, suspecting that either she would meet someone and fall in love or else she would be raped and killed. Eddy was about the first man she looked at, and it was perfect – love at first sight. She didn’t know much about attracting men, but she just kept talking to him and getting a bit tipsy and they went back to his cabin. Of course, she hadn’t slept with anyone else before or after.

Her parents didn’t make leaving their cabin easy. They didn’t like feeling old or losing part of their power, even though they had the baby now to fuss over, mould in their own image, instil with guilt from the earliest possible moment – Christ, little Annie must have felt guilty the second she was conceived!

Through the veil of smoke, her mother said: “You’ll regret it, Dido. You need us.”

Her father said: “And where do you think you’re going?”

Her mother said: “This is no way to treat us.”

Her father said: “You’re behaving like a spoiled little child.”

Her mother said: “Aren’t you interested in us any more? Don’t you care about us?”

Her father said: “Don’t come crying to us when you need help, that’s all.”

Moving in with Eddy was the best decision she had ever made.

The tobacco tin had a lion on the lid. She opened it, swinging the lion out of sight. Inside were the clippings of Eddy’s fingernails and toenails, scaly and brown. She had one hundred and thirty-seven of them.

He was a bit of a slob, Eddy, just cut his nails and left the clippings all over the floor, so when he was out she picked them up and put them in the tin carefully, lovingly. They were a little bit of him belonging to her and her alone. She had another tin somewhere with a collection of his body hairs.

Out of the tin in her hands she took a nail and held it between thumb and forefinger as daintily as a lady with a bone-china teacup. She popped it between her lips and chewed.

Eddy was gone all day. Diane moped around, washed a few of his shirts, made the bed, went for a walk, tidied up the cabin, sat and stared at the wall, slept fitfully, watched the light going from dim to black through the porthole, saw the service light go on, ate some tinned ham, washed herself, climbed into bed, waited.

He came back almost immediately after closing time, for which she was grateful. No council of war this evening. He told her about a girlfriend of Push’s who they were having this big thing against, nobody allowed to talk to the deadhead, wasn’t that funny? Actually, it wasn’t so funny later on because she scratched his face and she might have blinded him, the doctor can’t tell. Crazy deadhead bitch.

They did sex and during it she asked him to bite her. He did, and she asked him to bite her harder, and then harder, until he broke the skin and she orgasmed with the exquisite agony. Afterward, she examined the tear in her shoulder, the crescent of broken flesh weeping blood. She asked him to lick it better. Soon the bleeding stopped. The wound ached and throbbed, but she didn’t mind. She thought it looked like a smile, only upside-down.

As the world grew fuzzy with sleep she kissed him, probing his mouth with her tongue and tasting her own sweet blood on his teeth.

“I love you, Eddy.”

“I love you too, Diane.”

Sometimes it scared her that she loved Eddy so much, may be too much, for she had seen other girls ditched and broken-hearted. They let their hair go. They let their make-up run (when they could be bothered to put any on). They had red eyes. They went around saying it was all right, don’t worry about them. They did stupid things like have screaming fits and throw themselves at their exes. They were prepared to sacrifice their last shred of dignity for men who didn’t care about them. It was just as well Eddy loved her back. He always said “I love you too” as if he meant it, although she had heard that men were notorious liars. They weren’t even very good at lying, but they did it all the same, as if they were content not to fool anyone but themselves.

She was lucky to have Eddy, if only for the nights, when he was all hers, all of him except his mind. She had his heart, but she could never know his mind.

Lying awake, the porthole a glowing circle in the dark, hearing the occasional passer-by clang along the walkway, she asked: “Eddy, what are you thinking?”

He woke up.

“Huh?”

“What are you thinking?”

“Nothing. I was asleep. Why aren’t you?”

“Can’t. I keep thinking about you, how I love you, that kind of thing.”

“Well, don’t wake me up just to tell me that will you?”

“But what do you think – about me, about us, when you lie awake, after we’ve done sex?”

“You don’t
do
sex, darling, you have it. You have it.”

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“What do you think?” Was he playing games with her?

“I don’t know,” he said turning over on to his back with a sigh. “I suppose I think how happy I am… with you… you know. I think about … things. The Trident, the gang, how we’re going to come down on Lock, if it comes to it. Usual sort of stuff.”

She was silent for a minute.

“What do you think about me?” she asked.

“For Christ’s sake, why do you have to keep asking?”

“Because I have to know!”

“You don’t have to know. Can’t you just accept things? Can’t you trust me?”

“I do trust you.”

“Then shut up and go to sleep.”

She slid out of bed and walked across the cabin, shivering and naked.